... First up, I have no specialist knowledge of this area, so if there any howlers in here, I'm unlikely to spot them. However, I know a good book when I see one. This has been produced to a high standard as befits a book that intends becoming the definitive account of the relationship between the British intelligence and security services, and what finally became, after a bitter and highly divisive struggle, both north and south of the border, the 26 county Republic of Ireland (Eire). The author has made extensive use of both published sources and official papers (as far as permitted) on both sides of the Irish Sea, and this is ...

... principals. The US essentially used a shell company to conduct the war and through fraudulent bankruptcy to escape the duties incumbent upon a vanquished aggressor. Thirty years later this was still the dominant perspective and hence the implicit policy of the 19 US post-war military operations abroad were supposed to be justified either by 'invitation' of individual governments or through 'collective security' arrangements. The first of these was NATO formed to galvanise Western Europe as an anti-Soviet military alliance. SEATO, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation, was founded in 1954 to include Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, France and the United Kingdom as a US-led anti-communist block. India was non-aligned. SEATO was ...

... b, £17.95 It is hard to 'see' this book because a lot of the material, especially in the first half, is familiar, half-remembered from the press reporting of the Shayler-Machon drama and the book Defending the Realm by Nick Fielding and Mark Hollingsworth. Nonetheless, familiar or not, this is a devastating critique of the British security services and the political system which is nominally in charge of them. The only agencies which come well out of this are regional Special Branches, who are presented as reliable and sensible. The rest are incompetent – mind-bogglingly incompetent at times – self-serving, venal, or all three. This happens – this is allowed to happen – because ...

... fair guess that Neave's killing came up at that briefing." (Magill June 1979) Following this "The personal involvement of Mrs Thatcher with Airey Neave led to an unprecedented move. An intelligence sub-committee was set up to hunt Neave's killers. The then Paymaster General, Angus Maude, well known right-wing Minister, liaising with the Co-ordinator of Security and Intelligence in the Cabinet, Brooks Richards, headed it.. He promised unlimited financial resources to capture Neave's killers". (Magill above) "I want the maximum effort to get the killers and fast. I don't want an investigation that runs a month, two months or six months". (Harry's Game) For ...

... but absolutely par for the course in another; we are talking about Northern Ireland, after all- but simply allegations. Me, I believe it. But this isn't evidence. Even more interesting to me is the account given by 'Special Branch' of the thinking of our secret state personnel. "Stalker was becoming a pain to the security agencies, tantamount to a boil on the bum. The general consensus of opinion was that he had to be stopped. The most expedient treatment for a boil is to lance it. We hold no brief for cowboys, like a few of those who had been involved in some of the shootings, but that wasn't the issue for ...

... Cyprus. The decision left them wholly without legal redress; and this in spite of the fact that Britain was a guarantor of the island's independence. Can the United States really have believed that Nadir would co-operate with an arrangement which would result in the financial undermining of his business empire? Or was there behind the suggestion a double attempt to secure the real, but unacknowledged, Anglo-American interests in Cyprus, the preservation of their intelligence bases? Nadir's political position on the Cyprus question was more or less identical to Denktas's; but having both the dominant political and economic power in the North vested in one person, and one moreover who was a British resident and passport holder, open ...

... Charles Harding Smith, a UDA commander. (The shooting is the central subject matter of Kennedy Lindsay's Ambush at Tullywest: the British Intelligence Services in Action (1981) Explosions caused by the Parachute Regiment in 3 Brigade area. The bombing of the Alliance Party HQ in 1974 during the General Election- suspected of being the work of the security forces. SAS activities in the Irish Republic, including the arrest of two patrols in plain clothes by the Irish police. The plot to recruit an ex-professional football player to assassinate Provisional IRA officer Martin Meehan in Dundalk. The leaking of material by MI5, on MI6 operations, including the production of a booklet on the Littlejohns, and ...

... the fuzzy alleged 1963 assassination attempt on JFK planned for Chicago, and the role in exposing it of the black Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden. Every time I come across Bolden I am reminded what a great story this is. First black Secret Service agent; after the assassination, seeking to testify to the Warren Commission about the lax security practices of the Secret Service, he is framed by his erstwhile colleagues and dumped in a mental asylum. (Bolden and the Chicago incident are discussed at length in Vincent Palamara's The Third Alternative- Survivor's Guilt: the Secret Service and the JFK Murder. See Lobster 27 pp 26 and 31 for how to obtain this. Palamara's work ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 39) Summer 2000 Last| Contents| Next Issue 39 Curried Knight Maxwell Knight and the MI5 in-house history David Turner I have been scrutinising in some detail the Curry Report, The Security Service: its problems and organisational adjustments 1908-1945-- the in-house history of MI5 which was written by John Court( 'Jack') Curry (1887-?), a senior MI5 officer, during 1944-6. In so doing I have solved one of the great mysteries about Maxwell Knight. Anthony Masters has Knight joining MI5 in 1924 or 1925 (1) and Joan Miller has him joining in 1924 (2 ); but the Treasury Solicitor's file ...

... Angeles coroner and had a lot of famous corpses to examine. One of them was RFK's. In this book he repeats his original conclusions that Kennedy was shot at point blank range from the rear- i.e. not by Sirhan, who was in front. The assassin was almost certainly a man called Eugene Thane Cesar, dressed as a security guard, standing just behind Kennedy. Committee For A Community of Democracy New group mentioned in passing in Guardian 17th January 1984. Anyone seen other references, details of membership, aims, funding etc? Smersh Ian Fleming always claimed Smersh was a real organisation but references to it are scarce. One such is in the report of the ...